3DN to provide financial services

Introduction

As the PSD2 (Revised Payment Service Directive) becomes implemented, banks’ monopoly on their customer’s account information and payment services is about to disappear. PSD2 enables bank customers, both consumers and businesses, to use third-party providers to manage their finances. Banks, are obligated to provide these third-party providers access to their customers’ accounts through open APIs (application program interface). This will enable third-parties to build financial services on top of banks’ data and infrastructure.

Banking Tool

As a small company in the Netherlands one has many obligations. One of those obligations is to maintain a proper administration. As an IT company we have quickly realized that keeping an administration is a rather daunting yet repetitive task which can be automated fairly easily. As a consequence, for our own purposes only so far, we’ve developed an internal tool to maintain our administration. This includes a database of all the bills, tax forms, the possibility to link (‘book’) payments to bills, keeping a budget and advanced warning signals etc.

The above has always been a bit tedious as banks do not give up their information easily and keeping this administration involves downloading CSV files periodically, uploading these CSV files to our tooling and (mostly) manually booking these payments. As this is about to change with PSD2, we have decided to upgrade our tooling and provide the above functions as a service to entrepreneurs.

License

The Dutch government and the DNB have decided to thorougly review the EU PSD2 directive and to attach all sorts of bells and whistles a PSD2 provider needs to meet. Obviously this long process is intended to first give the Dutch Banks an opportunity to develop tools that will obsolete the need for third party providers. It’s sad but this is unfortunately the reality in a county where Banks and Government share the same bed. We first have to request EH3 electronic recognition services before even being able to request a ‘license’. That’s right. Up to the end of 2019 we intend to fulfill the conditions for obtaining such a license.

Future

The PSD2 license will at first only be applicable to our own financial services. We intend to take half a year for testing and coding so our internal finance tool can be rewritten to provide services for third parties.